Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Videos

Placing my art in contemporary/art historical context: A friend of mine, Em, suggested I look up Sam Taylor Wood after seeing my apple print. She hasn't seen the video yet, but these videos, and the text by Ossian Ward are really awesomely relevant to my work. Especially my Opposite of Green Video which I'm working on for pattillo.

"Two earlier films, Still Life of 2001 and A Little Death of 2002, similarly employ the distortion of time – except by speeding it up rather than by stopping it – in order to reveal the extant drama in the banality of the everyday. They also draw on the history of art, specifically from still life painting, long considered the lowliest and most insignificant among subjects for art. The camera records the rotting and putrefaction of, in the first instance, an arrangement of fruit in a bowl, and in the second, a freshly hung hare, both table settings commonly depicted in traditional still life painting. While the 17th-century Dutch or Spanish still life painters captured a peach at its moment of perfect ripeness or a flower in full bloom, Taylor-Wood’s films brings this ordinary genre of foodstuff to life, albeit through the very process of its degeneration. In a further irony, the whole image is magically renewed once the video loops back to the beginning, enacting an “eternal return”, as Nietzsche would have it, denying “Time’s thievish progress to eternity” as Shakespeare would have preferred it." - Ossian Ward, White Cube - Sam Taylor Wood